The house that Chekhov built

IN 1898, the 38-year-old Anton Chekhov was forced to leave the snowy birches of northern Moscow for the Crimea. His tuberculosis was worsening and, requiring a warmer climate, he chose to settle in the beautiful resort of Yalta in present-day Ukraine.

Still relevant: Romola Garai as Masha in Chekhov's Three Sisters, now on at the Lyric Hammersmith

The house that he built there remains one of the treasures of the region.

Constructed to his own unusual design on three floors, with a ravishing view of the Black Sea, it is where Chekhov spent the last five years of his remarkable — and all too brief — life.

Legacy: above, Anton Chekhov, who died in July 1904

Despite gradually becoming too ill to prune the roses in the garden that he lovingly planted as soon as he bought the plot of land, he wrote some of his greatest masterpieces here, including his plays Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, and the story The Lady with the Little Dog.

Surviving against the odds: a chronic lack of funds means Chekhov's Yalta retreat is in need of urgent restoration

It was here that he was visited by Gorky, Shaliapin and Stanislavsky, and entertained by Rachmaninov on the piano. It was on the Ericsson telephone in his study that he called Tolstoy and received telegrams about the Moscow Art Theatre's premiere of Uncle Vanya.

The house was also home to Chekhov's mother, who outlived her son, to his part-time actress-wife Olga Knipper, and to his sister Masha, who preserved its interior just as it was when her brother left it for the last time and opened it as a museum after the Revolution. None of the house-museums in Russia can boast such authenticity. The dacha, and its beautiful garden, are uniquely capable of evoking Chekhov's life during his last difficult years — and since Chekhov is regarded as the most important playwright of the 20th century, this is a cultural site of global importance.

Now, however, due to the vexed nature of Russian and Ukrainian relations, its future is in severe doubt. In a year when the 150th anniversary of Chekhov's birth is being celebrated the world over, the museum lies in chronic neglect. For the site to suffer any further damage — or, worse, be sold off to the highest bidder — would be a tragedy.

The house has already had to survive against considerable odds. Masha defended the house-museum first during the civil war, and then from Nazi occupiers. Before she died in 1957, at the age of 93, she passed curatorial responsibilities on to a young girl who still works at the museum today, despite being in her eighties.

It was a mark of the house-museum's hallowed status in Soviet times that it was funded directly by the Ministry of Culture. But when the Soviet Union collapsed, so did its funding, as the house suddenly found itself marooned in a Ukraine which does not regard the financial support of a museum devoted to a Russian writer as a priority.

The funds that the museum now receives from the local Crimean authority are barely enough to pay the modest salaries of its small team of dedicated staff, but in the meantime the physical fabric of the house has been steadily deteriorating. With ominous cracks appearing in the walls due to subsidence, and the ever-present threat of damp, the house is in urgent need of restoration.

The team of women devoted to preserving Chekhov's memory has been led in recent years by the scholar Alla Golovacheva, who originally joined the museum's research staff back in 1980, never imagining what awaited her as director in the harsh reality of post-Soviet Ukraine. In 2003, President Putin was brought to the house by Ukrainian President Kuchma during an official visit. They left fulsome thanks in the visitors' book but chose to ignore the personal appeal they were presented with, which, among other things, mentioned the museum's inability to pay for proper security.

The irony of the costly security measures put in place for their visit was clearly lost on them, and a valuable opportunity for Russia and Ukraine to show their ability to transcend political squabbles by working together in the cultural sphere was wasted.

It is encouraging that the current Ukrainian presidential hopeful Viktor Yanukovich pledged last week to provide funds for the house's restoration if elected but his reference to Chekhov as a "Ukrainian poet" (wrong on both counts) does not inspire confidence.

When she is not fighting battles with bureaucrats, Golovacheva has led a tireless campaign to bring the museum's plight to the attention of Russian and Ukrainian businessmen and politicians, who with rare exceptions have not accompanied their sympathy with injections of cash. In 2007, the absence of any proper heating system caused mould to appear in the walls of Chekhov's study, forcing the museum's partial closure.

The sight of peeling wallpaper and crumbling masonry during my visit that May, together with the sheaf of newspaper cuttings which Alla showed me as proof of her desperate efforts to do something, prompted me to start a campaign to raise money in England, as I felt confident that the many people who love Chekhov in this country would want to help. It is easy to forget that not all countries have organisations such as The National Trust, or official measures designed to safeguard the preservation of buildings of particular historical value.

Yalta was a fashionable resort in Chekhov's day, referred to as the "Russian Nice". While the Tsars all built sumptuous palaces on the fabled coastline, it is telling that Chekhov, who was always sensitive to the fate of ethnic minorities, chose to build his house on the edge of town in a village full of displaced Tatars, who immediately christened it the "White Dacha". The name stuck.

Chekhov could have rested on his laurels as a famous writer but he was a man with a social conscience, who built schools, exposed the injustices of the Tsarist penal system after an arduous journey to Siberia, promoted medical care in the community, planted trees, and even helped sufferers from tuberculosis in Yalta while dying of the disease himself. The White Dacha is worth protecting as a symbol of the cultural values he stood for, which are in danger of being forgotten in the part of the world he came from.

Chekhov biographer and translator Rosamund Bartlett is director of the Anton Chekhov Foundation, set up to preserve Chekhov's house in Yalta: www.yaltachekhov.org. From 26-31 May, she leads a Chekhov Anniversary Tour to Yalta, details of which can be found at www.exeterinternational.co.uk/chekhov.html, or by phoning 020 8956 2756.